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Archives For November 30, 1999

The Importance of Being Earnest

October 13, 2012 — 3 Comments

My first 5th grade class. The Millenium Class.

Well, I had hoped to have a great Viking-themed post written last week, but some unexpected events delayed that plan. Hopefully I’ll have something ready for you in another week or so, after I finish getting caught up on my classwork. Why do I need to be caught up, you ask? Well, as some of you may or may not know, I was actually back in Illinois for a week. Here’s why…

On Tuesday the 2nd of October I got an email from my mom about my great-Uncle Fred. He had suffered a massive stroke. It didn’t look good.

I spent the next day or so half-listening in class, as I thought about Fred, and home, and some other events that were happening back in suburban Illinois. There was a wedding I had hoped to attend, and it just killed me to miss it due to me being over here for a year. After looking at ticket prices, and finding one incredibly cheap, I decided to come home for a few days. I could afford to miss a week of school, and with everything that was going on, I felt it important enough to return home for a bit.

I was able to visit Fred one final time, although whether or not he knew I was there is tough to say for certain. Fred is a guy that I had an enormous amount of respect for, and he was always a favorite of mine from that side of the family. Fred served as a navigator on a C-47 during World War II and I always enjoyed talking to him about his time in the service. Last December we celebrated his 90th birthday.

Fred and the C-47 model everyone mistakenly thinks I gave him.

Mike and Liz were in my very first 5th grade class. Liz I had known already, as she was in my 4th grade class the year previous. Mike was new that year. By the end of the year I was in the process of starting up a new theatre program for the Oswegoland Park District, and both Liz and Mike were a part of that program in its first year. (Still are, as a matter of fact.)

Liz as Sarah from our 2003 production of The Last Dance, my first full-length original play for Limelight.

Eight years later, we were in the process of producing a new play called Heroes and Villains. It was the third and final part of a trilogy of shows I had written. Mike and Liz were in all three. This one was about growing up and moving on, and it was the last play I did with that original company of players I worked with year after year, show after show. It was time to start fresh, and I thought it was time for them to start doing other things as well.

Mike and Liz started dating that summer. During rehearsals of my last show with Limelight, they visited me to announce that they were getting married. And they had a request: would I write something original to read at the ceremony?

Mike visiting my classroom for a college assignment.

When I decided to move over to Dublin for the year, one of the hardest parts was knowing I wouldn’t be able to be there on their wedding day. I had flirted with coming back, but I didn’t think I’d be able to afford it. Someone else would read my piece at the reception.

So with all that, and with me wanting to say goodbye to Uncle Fred, I woke up very early on a Thursday morning and flew home.

I spent Friday working on class assignments down in my parents’ basement. I hadn’t said anything to anyone about coming home, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. It didn’t seem right to make this big announcement about me coming back; I was supposed to be in Ireland, right? It would upset the new order of everything! Plus, I was coming home for fairly solemn reasons, and it would seem cheap and dishonorable to turn Fred’s illness into an “I’m BAAAAACK!” moment.

Still, I was anxious to get out of that basement and see some friends, so I impulsively drove over to my place of employment to surprise an old friend. Turns out I surprised a few former students as well. I think Nick is still picking his jaw up from the sidewalk outside the school.

Caught up with the doings at work, then grabbed some drinks and dinner with friends at my favorite restaurant in Oswego. It felt like hardly any time had passed. And through the miracle of Facebook, people started hearing about my return.

On Saturday I cobbled together whatever fancy clothes I could find, and I drove to the Hardest-To-Find Wedding In The World. The service was supposed to start at 5:15. I got there around 25 minutes past and just made it.

Right around the time Mike and Liz said their vows, Uncle Fred quietly passed away, surrounded by his wife and children.

During the reception speeches were made and toasts were given. It came time for me to read my piece, and…well…I would say that reception was mixed, at best. The crowd had been primed to expect something short and funny, and instead I gave them something long and heartfelt. Maybe some of the crowd wasn’t expecting a short story catching up with Liz and Mike’s characters from those plays we had done, but that’s what they got.

When you have two former elementary students, two founders of the only family I’ve ever created from scratch, two people who I’ve shard a lot of life with getting married...well, you don’t get up and make a sarcastic joke out of everything. You stand up and you say something true and heartfelt and earnest. You try to find words that sums up everything about where you were, where you are, and where you’re going.

 

A few days later I put on a black suit, and my step-Dad, Uncle, cousin and I wore white gloves on our hands and we laid them on Fred’s casket and we helped escort him into a small Lutheran church and we said our goodbyes. And true and heartfelt and earnest words were said about a quiet, decent man who did extraordinary things with his long life.

Last year Fred gave me a tour of his exhibit at the Plainfield Historical Society. After looking at his artifacts displayed in a glass case, I spent some time looking at the other historical pieces from that era. There was a woman’s uniform on display, either a WAC or a WAVE. In the story that accompanied the uniform, a woman talked about how when they were on leave for a night or a weekend, they would continue to wear their uniforms, because of how proud they were of the work they were doing.

I remember tearing up a bit when I read that, and even now I get a little lump in my throat thinking about her words. They were just so…genuine. I remember thinking: how different we are these days. We stick our heads in the sand and we ignore the ugly truth about our current wartime situation. We go shopping. We keep an ironic distance from everything. This woman was so proud of what her uniform represented, what her country was doing to rid the world of an ugly, unfathomable evil.

When the war ended, Fred flew repatriation missions in Europe, helping bring displaced peoples back to their homes. He called it the most fulfilling work of his life.

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Wednesday

September 27, 2012 — Leave a comment

Wednesday is like an easy Friday for me. Sort of.

It’s the last day of classes for me, so there’s the relief of knowing I don’t have to prepare for anything the next day. At the same time, it’s still the middle of the week, and I certainly don’t get to enjoy 4-day weekends over here. What usually happens is that I get some groceries after class winds up (we go until almost six on Wednesdays), relax a bit, but if I’m feeling focused, I try to get a bit of work done in the evening as well.

Today’s class, Research and Analysis in Drama and Performance, was a particularly “academic” session. We spent almost four hours discussing Michel Foucault’s ideas about discipline in schools and in the military, and philosophical concepts like phenomenology, i.e. understanding an object as just a pure object, not our concepts and ideas we project onto that object. All that existential philosophy I studied back in my undergraduate years really helped with today’s discussion, lemme tell you.

I also shared a story about lockdown drills and how they work in elementary schools. The mostly-Irish class was pretty astonished at what has become quite a regular feature at American schools: kids smashed into dark corners trying to “hide” from imaginary armed intruders. We take something scary and unimaginable and turn it into sometime practiced and “routine.” (This relates back to Foucault’s ideas about discipline, and I’ll just leave it at that, lest I bore you too much.)

What does this have to do with theatre, you might ask? Well, I ask myself that sometimes as well, but it has to do with how we perceive bodies and objects in space and time, and how arranging actors and props and set pieces on a stage can be seen and understood many different ways.

From my 2010 production of All These Will Be Worthless. Photo by the awesome Amy Weiland.

Still with me? Don’t worry: no more classes this week, so the rest of the week’s posts won’t get so intellectual.

Around 9 or 10 I usually put away the schoolwork and watch TV. (I don’t read for fun these days since I’m spending so much time reading the heavy stuff I mentioned earlier.) I’ve worked my way through most of Breaking Bad, and I’ve been revisiting some of the U.S. version of The Office, remembering when it was really, really good. I also try to absorb some of Irish pop culture as well, and that has mostly been through a series called Father Ted, which is very, very funny, and has aged well since it first aired in the mid-1990s.

There’s also a great BBC documentary series about Vikings that’s been running for the past few weeks. And if you think I’m going to skip Viking Day just because I’m not in a classroom, kids, well, think again! Stay tuned…

Tomorrow: laundry day!

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Tuesday

September 26, 2012 — Leave a comment

Like Monday, I woke around 8 am and made coffee in a cheap coffee maker I bought at Tescos for 12 Euro. It doesn’t keep the coffee very hot, so I drink it quickly in my mug before it gets cold. The rain continued to come down steadily; I don’t think it had stopped since Monday.

Tuesdays are devoted to Text Analysis and Performance. Currently we’re working with Frank McGuinness on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Identifying who drives the story, is it a comedy or a tragedy, how would we stage it, etc. It’s just myself and one other woman in the class (who also does youth theatre), so we get a lot of one-on-one instruction, and it’s pretty great. Frank suffers no fools, so you have to be on your game in that class.

After class finished at noon my classmate and I headed into town to see a show called The Boys of Foley Street. (By the way, heading “into town” means heading into the Dublin city centre. Back in the states I suppose we say “going downtown” instead.) The show was a site-specific show; that means that everything took place in an “actual” location. There were only four people in the audience per performance, and you went from alley to car to dingy apartment and experienced a rather uncomfortable story about inner-city poverty, drugs, and violence. (And that’s all we need to say about that, former students. Stay in school and make good choices, right?!)

After the show we grabbed a bus down to the main University College Dublin campus at Belfield to hold auditions for our fall semester director projects. I have to be evaluated on two projects: one where the professors watch me rehearse a couple of scenes, and another where they view a finished project. I’ve been assigned two “classic” pieces, and I’m not exactly happy about the choices, but ahh well, “Theirs not to reason why” and all that…

We had a nice turnout and moved through about twenty people rather quickly, doing some improv exercises and cold reads from Chekhov. I would have liked to have had more time with the actors, maybe run a callback session, but I was just working with what I was given. It’s all been pretty confusing and hazy, and half the time I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing with a particular project or assignment.

And that’s probably the strangest thing about being a full-time student: the realization that I’m not in charge of the content or the process anymore. As a teacher and a director, I always ran the show, but now I’m back to just doing what’s assigned to me.

And to be honest? I kind of hate it.

The washing machine is IN the kitchen!

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Tick…Tick…Tick…Tick…Tick…

August 21, 2012 — Leave a comment

During my time in youth theatre, I’ve had the good fortune to work with a lot of great people. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to list all of them, but I imagine they’ll get brought up from time to time on here. Although I don’t plan on having this thing be just a bunch of “remember when” stories. No point in continually looking back to what’s already done and over with. Time marches on, life goes forward and all that. But you put the years in, and you wind up meeting some remarkable people.

I’m thinking of a couple of guys who have had some good fortune come their way lately. Kevin is a young guy I worked with on quite a few shows over the years, and last week he found a full-time job teaching history and running the drama program where I graduated high school. (It’s also where I got my start directing youth theatre as well, but I’ll save that tale for another time.) His first show will be one we did together back in 2005.

 

Adrian only appeared in one play I directed (he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but he was involved with Limelight for other shows, including his fantastic work as Music Director/Choreographer for Lumberjacks: The Musical! (Limelight’s first all-original musical to come from a casual joke made about an overflow of flannel shirts in the costume room.)

Anyway, Adrian was just nominated for a Jeff award for his performance in “tick…tick…Boom!” earlier this year. It’s a big deal, but honestly, if I know him, he’s more excited about the fact that he’s going to become a father for the first time later this year.

And that’s just what’s happening this week. There are others who are also doing great things out there, but this post has enough links and references for now. But Amanda and Tiffany and Anthony and Kris and Leslie and many, many others amaze me every day. ‘Nuff said.

Did I have much to do with their successes? Not really. (Definitely not Adrian. He came in already far ahead of anything I could teach him.) Hopefully I provided a place for them to be a little creative, to try something different, for one show or for many.

Even with this degree I’m about to start, I don’t expect to have a future that involves Jeff nominations or joining Equity. I’m a teacher. I’m good at it. If anything, I’m hoping to translate this into something where I can teach drama on a more full-time basis. I spent too many years in theatre while also trying to teach full-time. That wore me out.

So we’ll see where life takes me. Time is short, though, and sometimes I forget that I’m not a young guy in his twenties anymore. Right now, I have a big stack of books I have to read, and I should probably get working on that. But I was thinking about those two guys today, and I’m very proud of their successes, and what’s coming for the both of them.

 

(It’s a BIG stack.)

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A little Bob for the first day back

August 20, 2012 — Leave a comment

I should be driving to work right now. I should be getting ready for students. I should be meeting new staff, watching Important Blood-Borne Pathogen safety videos. I should be talking about changes to the Common Core, I should be wearing a staff t-shirt and khaki pants.

I am doing none of that today. And I will say this: it’s a bit weird. It’s not a lie to say that I love my job, and it’s also not a lie to say that I desperately needed to be doing something different this year.

So this is the song that’s running through my head right now.

Good luck on the first day back, people. Thinking of you today, but glad I’m not there.

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In Dublin

August 15, 2012 — 7 Comments

Friends, family, students, actors, and random people stumbling across this thing: Welcome, I says!

So…I’m living in Dublin now. Most of you knew that already, but for those that had no idea I had left my job teaching fifth grade (or the other one running a theatre company), um…yeah. Big changes, right?

I’ll spend some time detailing exactly how I came to the decision to pack up one life and start another in future posts. For now, the short answer is this: I’m taking a year’s leave from teaching and will be attending University College Dublin to get a Master of Arts in Directing for Theatre. I’m hoping to do more theatre education in my career, and I felt it was time to add some tools to the toolkit. And, you know, actually study theatre for once instead of just making it up as I go.

I’ll be writing about four main subjects on this site: teaching and theatre, travel and tech. In whatever order I want, when I want.

My students wanted a way to keep in touch with me and follow my travels, so that was the beginning of this site. Some of them will be reading this, some may even comment, so we’re keeping things nice and clean on here. No angst-ridden tales of sorrow, no political rants, no swearing. And that goes for the comments as well, so keep it nice and positive, people.

Students: remember your internet safety lessons: don’t put your full name OR your email address in the comments if you happen to leave one. “Liz H” or “Mike A” will suffice. I’ll know who you are.

The site is pretty bare-bones right now, so sit tight while I tinker and add some cool stuff. You can subscribe to it via email or RSS, depending on how tech-savvy you are. I don’t know how often I’ll be updating, but I promise I’ll do my best to be fairly regular about it.

For now, feel free to say hello in the comments, and stay tuned for the next post.

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